He looked different from the lad who’d sailed six months before. He walked with a sailor’s sway now, even when he was no longer on a heaving deck.
The Boy held up a coil of rope. ‘Come on girl! You’re going ashore! We’re going in the next boat, after the gentlemen.’
The gentlemen were the scientists. They’d been on deck all day, some with their notebooks and others with brushes and easels.
‘Eeegh!’ The Goat stood up. It would be the first time she’d been ashore since they left Plymouth. And she could smell grass out there, as well as smoke and ice.
It was about time.
CHAPTER 14
Isaac
15th January, 1769
Isaac stood by the rail, holding the Goat’s rope in one gloved hand, as he waited for the ship’s boat to come back from the scrubby shore, where the green gave way to the dark brown of the plateau’s cliffs, and the white capped mountains beyond.
The ice in the wind stung his cheeks, but he hardly noticed. He had a problem.
It had seemed like a good idea: instead of simply cutting grass for the Goat he’d take her ashore, tether her and let her nibble while he scythed as much as he could before nightfall, so it could dry enough to be stored on the ship without rotting. The Goat needed a lot of hay, for bedding as well as to eat, and there’d be no chance to get any more till they reached Tahiti.
But how did you get a goat off a ship and into a small boat? It was easy to get a goat ashore in dock, when there was a gangplank to cross. But how did you manage it when the ship was at anchor?
‘What are you doing, Mr Manley?’ It was Mr Molineaux.
Isaac explained. ‘So I thought it would be a treat for her to go ashore,’ he finished.
Molineaux’s mouth twitched like he was trying not to grin. ‘Your devotion to duty does you proud, Mr Manley. But I think Her Highness had better stay on board this time.’
‘I thought maybe we could lower her down into the boat.’
Molineaux lost the battle. His snort of laughter startled even the sailors up in the rigging, so they stared down to see the joke.
‘I can just imagine the captain’s face when he sees his goat dangling from the railing! It’s a kind thought and a good plan, Mr Manley. But just you take her back to her pen. I reckon it’s a bit cold for the lass on shore today. She’ll be better off snug in her pen. I’ll set someone else to milk her. You go ashore and get her some fresh grass. That’s enough o’ a treat for her.’
‘Yes, sir.’
What else could Isaac say? He knew enough never to argue with an officer.
‘Need some help?’ It was Jonathan. He held up a scythe. ‘I asked Mr Molineaux if I could cut grass too.’
‘Don’t you want to explore with the others?’ Jonathan’s surgeon brother William was going with Banks’s men, up onto the plateau. Isaac had assumed that Jonathan would go too.
Jonathan looked serious. ‘William says it’s too dangerous. He’s only going in case the others get into trouble. The captain says snow’s coming. But Mr Banks insisted.’
Isaac stared across the harbour. He could just make out Banks’s figure, leading the way up from the shore. Mr Banks did not appreciate being told he couldn’t do exactly as he wanted.
‘Eeegh!’ Isaac glanced back guiltily as he clambered down the rope ladder into the boat. But it wasn’t his fault that the Goat had to stay on board while he went gathering grass.
It was too exciting to think of the Goat for long. As the boat drew closer to the shore he could see that even the strange stubby trees were completely different from anything he’d seen. And the people! This was better from anything he’d seen at Rio or Madeira!
There were about thirty Fuegians waiting on the shore, evidently used to visiting ships. They were small people, with shiny, copper-coloured skin and long black hair. Their faces were painted red or black, red being their favourite colour. Apart from loose fitting sealskin cloaks, they were…
Naked!
Jonathan gave an appreciative whistle. Isaac tried not to stare, but he couldn’t help it. Oh, he’d known that people elsewhere didn’t wear as many clothes as the English—he’d read Wallis’s accounts of Tahiti. But reading about them was different from seeing them!
All those dangly bits! None of the men wore anything at all, apart from a few furs around their shoulders, and the women just wore a fur loincloth over their black painted bodies.
It was so rude!
‘Look at that one!’ Jonathan pointed at a particularly buxom Fuegian woman. Isaac nodded, embarrassed.
‘William says that they live in round huts made of branches and covered in sealskin. Magellan called this place the “land of fires” because of all the red fires he could see along the shore,’ said Jonathan, delving into his store of useful information. ‘They don’t even have any boats!’
The boys spent the day scything, while about them sailors filled barrels with fresh water and collected firewood. It wasn’t easy finding enough grass among the trees, and what was there was tough and short. Their hands grew numb with cold, even in their mittens, so they had to stop often to warm them by the small fire on the shore.
Isaac was back on board for the evening milking. There were flurries of snow across the deck now.
He gazed out at the mountains as his hands found their familiar rhythm. The clouds were lower, and even the lower slopes were clothed in white. He finished the milking and put his mittens on as fast as he could.
Jonathan was waiting for him as he carried the bucket down to the lower deck. ‘They’re not back yet,’ he said.
Isaac nodded. It was nearly dark now, as much from the snow clouds as from the night. ‘They’ll be all right,’ he said encouragingly. ‘They’ll make a fire. Your brother’s no fool.’
But Mr Banks is, he thought. A fool to insist that they set out in this weather. But neither boy said that out loud. Any disrespect for so important a gentleman might get them the lash, and there were always people listening with so many on such small a ship.
Suddenly Isaac heard the captain’s Yorkshire accent. ‘You mean the gentlemen haven’t returned?’
‘No, sir.’
There was silence. The captain rarely swore, unlike most of the men. But Jonathan claimed the captain’s silences were even worse than any man’s oaths.
‘Should we send out a search party, sir?’
Isaac saw Cook stare out into the gathering gloom. ‘No, Mr Gore.’ Cook’s voice was carefully expressionless. ‘Any search party would run the risk of getting lost themselves. Or freezing to death. We’ll search tomorrow.’
‘I’m going below,’ said Jonathan. Isaac heard his feet pad down the companionway.
Isaac delivered the milk to Mr Matthews, then fetched a pannikin of pease for the Goat. She needed the extra food in the cold. Up on the quarterdeck he stared out at the shore again. But it was impossible to make out anything but a few small fires. Where were they?
The Goat tugged gently on Isaac’s cuff. Isaac hurriedly handed her the pease. The Goat was quite capable of chewing a hole in his coat if she was annoyed.
What would happen to the expedition if the gentlemen were really lost? The whole purpose of the voyage was to measure the transit of Venus; and Mr Green was the one who was supposed to do it. And Mr Banks was the one who’d paid the enormous sum of £10,000 towards the voyage.
What would happen if Green and Banks were lost?
Would they have to return to England, a failure, maybe a laughing stock—the ship which couldn’t even keep a party of scientists safe?
But it wasn’t the captain’s fault, thought Isaac. How can the captain order someone like Mr Banks not to be an idiot and wander off?
But it was still Cook who would be blamed.
Isaac pulled an old bit of sailcloth over the Goat’s pen to keep the snow off, then went to get her fresh hay. The hay would help to keep her warm, though goats were hardy animals, and able to survive in much harsher weather than this as long as
they were kept dry. The sheep’s oily coats would keep them warm no matter how drenched they got, but Mr Molineaux had impressed on Isaac how important it was that the Goat had shelter from the rain and wind.
A lantern had been lit down below in the galley, as Cookie Thompson ladled out the hot stew. Normally the crew only had ship’s biscuit and maybe butter or cheese for their evening meal, to save precious water, wood and charcoal. But with plenty of wood on shore the captain had ordered Thompson to make a hot gruel of biscuit and fresh greens stewed up in water to warm the crew.
Isaac accepted a bowlful and took it up to his cannon, out of reach of any bigger sailor who might take a fancy to his meal.
The gruel tasted faintly bitter—the longer the ship was out at sea the sourer the ship’s biscuits became, impregnated with weevils and their droppings, and the greens were already slightly bitter. But it was warming, nonetheless.
What was Jonathan doing? Isaac wished he could say something to reassure him. But Jonathan would be eating with the other midshipmen, not the common sailors. Besides, what was there to say?
Were William and the gentlemen already frozen, out there in the snow?
Was this the end of the Endeavour’s journey?
But the gentlemen returned, three hours after dawn, before the search party had even gone beyond sight of the ship. They had survived, and so had William, but two of Banks’s servants had frozen to death. Two others of the party were staggering from cold and exhaustion.
It was Banks’s fault: he simply hadn’t allowed enough time to return to the ship before nightfall. But Banks didn’t seem to feel guilty or even particularly sorry, thought Isaac, watching the botanist’s excited face as he described to Mr Molineaux the new alpine plants he’d collected up on the high plateau.
The rest of the party went to bed, to recover from their sleepless night of bitter cold. But Isaac watched as Banks climbed down into the boat again, to go fishing.
That’s what would happen if I died, he thought suddenly. The life of the ship would go on. And maybe no one would even mourn.
CHAPTER 15
The Goat
January–April 1769
The Goat enjoyed the fresh grass, but she didn’t like the snow, or the change to her routine. She was pleased to see the preparations for departure: the barrels of fresh water stowed; the sheaves of partly dried grass stacked on deck; the sails hoisted and the anchor raised.
She hoped there would be no more interruptions for a while.
There weren’t. From now on the ship’s luck changed. The Endeavour easily rounded the Horn that had been the death of so many ships, and soon they were in the Pacific. It lived up to its name—the pacific, or calm, ocean. Icy storms gave way to blue skies. No land, just sky and sea, each so blue it was hard to tell one from the other.
The Goat liked the routine, but for the men it began to become wearisome. There were two and a half months ahead of the same faces, the same food, the only change the gradual warming of the air as they sailed north again. Cook reorganised the watches, giving the men eight hours on, eight hours off, and held parades, as well as making sure that the living quarters were scrubbed twice a week, and the brass kept shiny even in the salty damp. The men fished, or carved keepsakes, or yarned about other journeys, other ships. But after so long on board, all the stories had been told before.
In the almost endless boredom a young marine, William Greenslade, stole someone’s sealskin, a souvenir of Tierra del Fuego. Then, when the theft was discovered, threw himself overboard, preferring to drown rather than face his shipmates.
The winds blew strong and fresh into the sails—so strong and fresh that the more experienced sailors shook their heads. No land had ever blocked winds as strong as this. The Great South Land they were supposed to be heading towards was just a dream.
None of that mattered to the Goat. She had her hay, her oats, her straw, and the Boy to milk her and keep her company.
And then one day she smelled land again. There was no way she could tell the Boy or the captain; they’d have to wait till the lookout realised the smudge on the horizon was land, not cloud.
The Endeavour was about to reach Tahiti.
CHAPTER 16
Isaac
12th April, 1769
The tree-clad volcano towered high above them as the Endeavour sailed into the bay. Smiling, dark-skinned men rowed high-powered canoes out to meet them. And there on the shore were the women…
Isaac stared, entranced. The women here wore very little more than the Fuegians—and they were much more beautiful! Tall and slim, with long black hair…Jonathan had told him that the sailors who’d been here before on the Dolphin said that any girl would go with a sailor if he gave her a nail: the iron was prized by the islanders on this land without metal.
Exactly what would the girls do? wondered Isaac. Jonathan had also said that in this land it was immoral for men and women to eat together. How could right and wrong be so different in other lands?
Canoes surrounded the ship even before they dropped anchor. Some were massive: double canoes a hundred feet long with cabins, sails and outriggers; and all with people waving the green branches that Mr Gore said were a sign that they wanted to be friends. Others held up coconuts and a fruit that looked like an apple, and other great knobbly fruits and fish, even a small pig.
‘What do you think?’ Jonathan yelled over the shouts of the crowd below and the squealing of the pig. ‘Worth rounding the Horn for this?”
‘It’s paradise,’ said Isaac fervently, staring at the coconut palms, the bright coral beach, and the laughing women.
‘Eeegh,’ said the Goat, up on the quarterdeck. But it was a sound more of disgust than admiration.
CHAPTER 17
Isaac
June–July 1769
The Goat was partly right: Tahiti was no longer a land of plenty. Some disaster had struck the island since the Dolphin had left. There was no longer as much food—or as many people—and feeding the further hundred or so mouths was going to be difficult.
But Cook had no choice. His men needed fresh food to stay healthy, and the ship would need all its dry stores for the journey of exploration ahead.
There were other problems too. European sailors had brought disease to the formerly healthy islanders—and soon about a third of the ship’s crew were infected with venereal disease. Flies crawled over every surface, so many that Mr Parkinson, the painter who drew Mr Banks’s specimens, had to work inside a mosquito net just to keep them off his work.
Nails were still prized, too—and to Cook’s fury, so many were stolen, either by the islanders or by the crew wanting to win the favours of the women, that the ship was in danger of falling apart. Cook also had to deal with rival groups, who wanted the Endeavour—and its cannons—to support them.
But for Isaac none of this mattered. Nothing could mar the island’s beauty. The Tahitians’ plain wooden houses were built between the mountains and the sea, each in a grove of coconuts and breadfruit trees, with paths leading from house to house. None of the houses had walls, just a high roof of palm fronds, so that the winds could cool the family as they slept: the master of the house in the middle with his wife, then the married people of the family, then the unmarried women with the unmarried men a little way away, with their servants sleeping out under the trees, unless it rained.
Soon food was brought from further afield, so there were no more shortages. The Tahitians regularly came to the ship to trade pigs, chickens, coconuts, yams, breadfruit and bananas—both the hard cooking bananas and the softer ones that could be eaten fresh. Cook had put Banks and Solander in charge of bartering with the local people: swapping a spike nail for a small pig; a hatchet for a big one; a small spike nail for a chicken; twenty coconuts or breadfruit for a forty-penny nail; ten for a white glass bead and six for an amber one.
Sometimes, as he drank the thin hot coconut juice or felt the hard white sand between his toes, Isaac marvelled that he was r
eally here. He’d dreamed of new lands when he enlisted, but the reality was so much more than he’d ever imagined. A place where people rode canoes back to the shore on giant waves—for fun! Where people ate jellyfish—and dogs!
At first he thought he’d never be able to eat a dog. But Cookie had roasted one, as well as some big birds, on a fire on the beach. Jonathan had grabbed a bit, so Isaac had tasted it too, not to be outdone in front of the older midshipmen.
It had tasted a bit like the roast lamb at home, just like the breadfruit baked in the coals was a little like baked potato. Soon he was eating dog as easily as he ate the island’s pigs.
The islanders made cloth from thin strips of bark, peeled from the trees and beaten together. They had drums, and flutes and games and kept slaves, like English landowners did in the West Indies and Americas. But it was the dances that entranced Isaac, just as they captivated every member of the crew, except the captain, who announced that they were indecent—and most of the songs indecent, too.
But June and the transit of Venus were growing closer. Cook asked the island chiefs for permission to build a fort on a nearby promontory, to house the observatory. They couldn’t risk having their precious scientific instruments stolen by the local people, and the place he chose had a river on one side and the sea on the other.
The locals had no idea they were the reason for the fort. They happily helped put up two great walls of earth, with a tall palisade of tree trunks on top and two big guns at either end. Now ‘Fort Venus’ was secure.
Tents were put up inside the fort for those who were staying on shore: one for the cooper to make his barrels in, one with a forge and oven for the cook and another for the scientific instruments.
But the precious telescopes were kept in Mr Banks’s tent to make doubly sure they were kept safe. Without them there could be no measurement at all.
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